Lauren Wolk pens new book

By Conor Powers-Smith

Monday

Jul 20, 2015 at 5:00 AMJul 22, 2015 at 2:18 PM

As associate director of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth, Lauren Wolk works with painters, musicians, and artists of all stripes on a daily basis. But Wolk has also nurtured her own creative career as a writer, poet and visual artist. Now, she looks forward to a new phase in her writing career after signing a contact with Penguin for two young adult books.

“We had a bidding war between seven publishers, and that was beyond my wildest expectations,” Wolk said of the high level of interest garnered by her novel, "Wolf Hollow."

“I kept having to wake up and pinch myself and say, ‘I guess is really happening, but I don’t see how it’s possible.’”

"Wolf Hollow," the story of a girl coming of age on and around a small farm in western Pennsylvania in 1943, will likely be released in March or April 2016. The story arose from tales passed down by Wolk’s family.

“I set the story there, I modeled some of the characters after my mother and her brothers,” Wolk said. “Lots of my mother’s experiences, which she told me about over and over again over the years, the family lore, inspired the book, but it is a work of fiction.”

Actual occurrences provided Wolk with inspiration, and her imagination wove them into an intriguing novel. “The seed of the story is from things that really happened,” she said. “For instance, there were vagabonds who wandered through the countryside, who had been cast adrift by the Depression, or World War I, or some other disaster. Hobos, vagabonds, whatever you want to call them, drifters would come through the farm, asking for food, or a chance to work. So there’s a character in the book who’s one of those, a main character.”

Location tends to provide the jumping-off point. “I usually start with the place, the setting, and I develop that in my head for a while, then I start with one person, and a germ of a conflict, and that’s all I want to know,” Wolk said. “There are surprises that way for the author. I’m shocked at some of the things that happen in ‘Wolf Hollow,’ that I never expected to happen. It was great. It was like you’re reading the book you’re writing at the same time.”

The same was true for Wolk’s debut novel, 1998’s "Those Who Favor Fire,” which tells the story of the inhabitants of a small town called Belle Haven menaced by an underground coalmine fire. Besides demonstrating just what it takes to write a publishable novel, and proving she was capable of it, that book also taught Wolk some lessons about the business side of literature.

“I got what I thought at the time was very lucky,” Wolk said. “I sent the book to Random House, and they bought it. I didn’t have an agent.” But the quick acceptance turned into a very slow road to publication. “It took me only about eight months to write, but then it took seven years before it actually made it into print.”

Without someone in her corner, Wolk’s book was not considered a priority. “The really good luck, and being in the right place at the right time, was balanced out by a really hard lesson, which was, there’s a reason you have an agent, and they earn their money, absolutely,” she said. “When you don’t have an agent representing you, you are by far the last on the list to get attention, and my editor, although he was a very good one, was a part-time editor, and he had a lot of very big clients, so when they came in with a new book, my book went on the shelf, sometimes for a year or more.”

Counter-intuitively, too, having a previously published novel proved more of a hindrance than a help. “First-time authors are considered to be potentially the next great thing, if you’ve already had a book published and it wasn’t a bestseller, you’re considered less likely to be the next great thing,” Wolk said. “Some people even change their names for a second book, if the first one didn’t do well. They write under a new name, they try and fool the publishers into thinking they’re a first-time novelist. I don’t know how that works, but I wasn’t prepared to do that.”

This time around, Wolk relied on an agent she trusts, and made sure to factor the editor into her decision. “I chose Penguin for a number of reasons, primarily because Julie Strauss-Gable is the editor there who was bidding on the book, and she is just phenomenal,” she said. “Her reputation is amazing.”

Wolk’s expectations of Strauss-Gable’s work have been more than met. “I love virtually everything she suggested,” Wolk said. “There were very few small things where I had to really think about it, but almost all of them were so straight forward, so insightful.”

The decision to market the book to young adults necessitated some revisions. “Because I had written it for a general audience, there were a couple places where she said, ‘Kids are going to need a little more here,’” Wolk said. References to historical occurrences had to be fleshed out, and vocabulary had to be reconsidered. “If I had a choice between quahog and clam, I had to stop and think. It is a quahog I’m talking about, but those who don’t know what a quahog is or have never seen that word are probably going to be yanked out of the scene by it. Is it important that it be a quahog?”

Wolk was surprised at first to see "Wolf Hollow" characterized as a young adult novel. I hadn’t written it for that audience. I hadn’t written it for any audience, but I was thinking of adults as I wrote it, because that’s all I’ve ever written, was for adults.”

But the genre has proven fruitful already. “Apparently I’ve hit my niche, because my next book (tentatively titled "Crow") is done already,” she said. “I was an avid reader when I was that age, and the books I read then contributed greatly to my development as a human being, and if I have that sort of relationship with readers who are in their formative years, I couldn’t ask for anything more as an artist. Your goal is always to communicate what’s important to you, and that’s what I’m doing in these books.”

With a pre-publication book tour likely to begin early next year, taking Wolk to a number of countries, she is unsure how much time she will have to devote to the Cultural Center. “I have between now and January to figure it out,” she said. “If I go on an extended book tour, I’ll just take a leave of absence, or I will make myself a part-time person and I can do a lot on the road. We’ll see.”

However long her absence, and however well her books do, Wolk does not envision leaving the institution for good. “The day will come, if these books are really successful, when I’m probably just going to want to write full time. I love the Cultural Center so much that I can’t imagine ever really leaving it. So I would never say I’d leave and not come back or leave completely.”